“Captain’s Log, Stardate 2263.2. Today is our 966th day in deep space – A little under three years into our five year mission. The more time we spend out here, the harder it is to tell where one day ends and the next one begins. It can be a challenge to feel grounded, when even…

“Because I hears your lonely heart, in all the secret whisperings of the world.” ‘The BFG’, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2016 and based on a novel by Roald Dahl, is a fantasy adventure story for children. It starts in London, part-modern, part-Victorian and part-1980s. Sophie, an orphan played by Ruby Barnhill is snatched in…

“Proton guns are all well and good, but sometimes you need the Swiss Army.” ‘Ghostbusters’, directed by Paul Feig in 2016, is a comedy fantasy remake of a highly regarded 1980s movie of the same name. It features a trio of scientists and an MTA worker who is an expert in New York folklore as…

“I was determined not even to make a film about cinema, but this one came out of daydreaming, out of not filming. Seamus Heaney says inspiration is a ball kicked in from nowhere, and it felt like ‘A Story of Children and Film’ was just that.” ‘A Story of Children and Film’, a documentary directed…

“No, it’s actually very complex once you start to think about it as a programming problem. Just the number of possible games explodes exponentially with each move, it’s close to 10 to the 120th power. And to try and compute all those games might take even longer than humanity would be around to do so.”…

“I want to be with my sister.” ‘Tale of Tales’, directed by Matteo Garrone in 2015, is a European adaptation of three Giambattista Basile stories with adult horror overtones. The three stories are unlinked, but the characters meet at the beginning (a funeral) and the end (a wedding). One story focuses on a queen whose…

It is now five months since I finished watching Mark Cousins’ ‘Story of Film’ and decided to increase my knowledge of and exposure to more interesting movies (I’m aware all this makes it sound like a prison sentence). I’ve watched, thought about and written about 133 movies watched which means around 30,000 words or a…

“Clothes make me feel claustrophobic. I wish I could stay naked all the time.” ‘The Skin I Live In’, directed by Pedro Almodóvar in 2011, is a dark, psychological horror movie. The story centres on an unhinged plastic surgeon, Robert who is keeping a woman, Vera hostage, apparently to experiment on her to test a…

“Brain cancer. Surgery left a terrible scar. I wear this yarmulke to cover it up. They didn’t get it all… you know, the cancer. Said it’ll probably come back. Who knows about these kind of things? Only God… Anyway, they say that miracles happen out here on the Camino de Santiago.” ‘The Way’, directed by…

“You are all my children, and you’re lost because you follow blind leaders. No more false gods. I’m here now.” Bloated Would I recommend it? Yes – better than ‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’. Watch in a double bill with all the other X-Men movies…

“I have a plan to go mad.” ‘Holy Motors’, directed by Leos Carax in 2012, is a fantasy about a man, played by Carax regular Denis Lavant, who, throughout the movie, adopts various appearances and roles. The film follows a day in his life as he moves from one weird assignment to the next pretending…

“In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a…

“What is wrong is wrong, no matter who said it or where it’s written.” ‘A Separation’, directed by Asghar Farhadi in 2011, tells the story of an affluent couple in Tehran who petition the courts for a divorce. The desire of the wife to be apart from her husband, and the complications caused by the…

“I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means…

‘High-Rise’, directed by Ben Wheatley in 2015, is an adaptation of a J. G. Ballard novel by a director known for his eclectic range and his distinctive style. It’s the story of Robert Laing, played by Tom Hiddleston, a psychiatrist in a version of the 1970s who moves into an apartment in a high-tech residential…